Speed-dating and strategery at the pre-Challenge mixer

Nonprofit reps and volunteers met-up last Thursday evening to prep for the March 20-21 Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge. Hosted by Challenge sponsor Benchmark Learning, the pre-Challenge mixer was mostly dedicated to a speed-dating exercise during which volunteers made the rounds for a bit of face time with each of the 16 nonprofit organizations – knowing their teams of 9-10 web pros will work pro-bono for one of them, but of course, not knowing which org they’ll serve until March 20, with the big reveal just moments before the 24-hour countdown begins.

Before the nerdy/needy speed-dating began, several secrets of Overnight success were revealed by the Praxis team (defending champs), represented by  Colle+McVoy’s Jason Striegel and The Nerdery’s Brian Litzenger. We’ve copied their notes and posted them verbatim below, but before you read and reread them, check out the good deeds they did for District 202 at last year’s Overnight Website Challenge.

Overnigt Website Challenge Strategery (unabridged), brought to you by Praxis:

In General

Come prepared

• Get your critical thinking tasks done as early in the game as possible.
• Assess risks as early as possible. You don’t want to be solving challenging problems at 4 AM in the morning.
• Work in small bursts. Attack something concrete 30-60 minutes. Accomplish it. Take a 10-minute break.

Teams

Designate roles now:

• server / connectivity / tech support
• database guru
• source control and backup master
• back-end cms team
• front-end html/css integration team
• flash / jquery / front end dev
• design team
• writing / content plan
• ia / wire-frames
• producer
• sweeper
• special ops

Designate a person who can respect everyone’s opinions and who will make tough choices when there are differences of opinion. Democracy and waiting for consensus do not work well on short timelines. Choose the 1 person who you can all be angry at. Ideally, this would be your producer or your team lead.

• Choose your tools – server environment, dev language, frameworks, CMS, plugins, etc.
• Go with what you know.
• Research what you don’t know. You don’t want to be figuring too much out the night of.
• Have an expert on your team for anything you’re choosing to use.

Have a backup plan if things don’t work out. If that new CMS you’ve been wanting to use doesn’t work out the way you were planning, be prepared to fall back on that clumsy solution that you know you know like the back of your hand. Be prepared to make this hard decision within a few hours of starting.

• Set up your server now.
• Get everything you plan to use running.
• Make sure everyone will be able to connect to it.
• Test / simulate if possible.

You DO NOT want to spend the first 3 hours trying to sort through connectivity issues, getting people passwords, and figuring out how to turn off php magic-quotes and get mod-rewrite working correctly in order to get your CMS running.

• Use source control.
• Or, have a really good plan for making snapshot backups.
• Have one or two people on the team make local backups at key checkpoints…
• Count on someone trashing the wrong folder and deleting 4 hours of work at 6AM in the morning – that someone will probably be you.

Plan your attack

• Get the whole team together for the first hour to discuss your plan with the client.
• Make sure you understand their audience(s) before you begin anything else.
• Make a site map. the client will hopefully bring their ideas to get the discussion started.
• Content audit – understand what needs to be written, what images need to be obtained, where to source content for each section of the site map.
• Spend time wireframing.

Listen to your client. Stand with what you believe is the right solution, but if you disagree on something in these early stages, don’t be afraid to listen some more. It’s worth the time. Remember that you both want to make the best site possible.

Outside of the standard CMS and site dev, plan on tackling only 1 or 2 custom features that address a core business objective.

• Have one owner per custom feature.  this is your special ops dude(s).
• Failure or difficulty here should not jeopardize the rest of the project.

Start work on your presentation right away

• Assign a presenter.
• This is a joint effort between the team presenter and the client.
• Your presentation starts when you begin planning. The output of your planning session should be an outline for what you want to accomplish. You want to present that the next day as an outline of what you  did accomplish.
• Do not start preparing this at 6 in the morning. You will have the effective IQ of a can of V8. Nobody cares about what tomato and celery have to say.

Non-profits

Come prepared

• You know your business better than anyone else.
• The better you can communicate this to your team, the more effective your site will be.
• The faster you can transfer this knowledge, the more time your team gets to work on making things to solve your problem.

Delegate expertise

• Your team knows design, understands user experience, and has experience making successful sites.
• Send an expert that can represent and communicate your organization’s's mission, brand, and message.
• Allow your team to choose the tools they feel will best enable them to solve your business problem.

Understand your objectives

• What does your web site need to accomplish? What’s your goal? What would a successful site look like / what role would it perform? Who does your site need to talk to? Clients? Donors? Volunteers? The Public? Staff?
• Rank those audiences in order of their importance with respect to the site. Who does the site need to serve: Volunteers, Clients, and then Donors or Clients, Donors, and then Volunteers. This is hard, but you need to make a decision here.

For each audience, what does the site need to do for them?

• Why do they come to your site?
• What do they want to accomplish when they get there?
• What do you want to entice them to do?

Make a sitemap

• You can do this on a whiteboard or with post-its.
• Make a page for each piece of content that you can think of: home page, how to volunteer, about us, staff, location map, what we do, etc.
• Make sure you have accommodated the content that is essential for your primary audiences.
• Organize these pages into groups.
• Sometimes it helps to start first by grouping by audience.
• Also try grouping it by subject matter.

Try to keep the site from being more than 3 levels deep. Then aim to organize things at a max of 2 levels deep. Can you take it to one level? Find the balance between organization and the ease with which users can find your content.

Plan your content

• Does a page include photos?
• Other than just a few paragraphs of text, are there other relevant data types to think about? Dates, youtube videos, inventory, links to other pages.
• Special pages to consider with specific logic and data: job postsings, events, press releases, blogs, etc.

Find your content

• Plan on bringing everything to the event that might be edited and incorporated into the final site.
• Any content, images, or copy that isn’t brought to the event ready-to-go and awesome will need to be produced and written before it can be edited and incorporated into the site. Is this where you want your team to be spending their time?
• You might be lucky and have a word-smith on your team. It’s also possible that you’ll end up with programmers writing your homepage copy. Think about that.
• Images. Photography. Big. Beautiful. Personal. Bring them.
• Logos, and brand assets. Vector format, if possible.

Plan on participating

• You should expect to be a major contributor to your team.
• Your contribution will make the work better.
• A joint effort will be a huge motivator for all team members. At 5:00AM, you don’t want any team members feeling like slave labor.  Your skin in the game will prevent that from happening.
• Again, you have unique and special knowledge about your organization that can only make the work more relevant.

A Few Notes About Sleep

• Try and oversleep for at least 2 or three days prior to the event.
• If you think you need sleep, plan on taking a cat nap or two. If you are used to pushing through, do that.

Pace yourself with the expectation of diminishing returns on effort as time goes on. Try to get 80% of the work done in the first 12 hours, 15% of the work in the next 6 hours, and 4.5% of the work in the next 5, and the final .5% of work will be painstakingly constructed with the help of sleep-dep hallucinations and a few remaining slack-jawed, drooling, meat bags that you used to call teammates.

Beware of caffeine and sugar.

• It can help keep you awake, but it doesn’t mean you’re making smart decisions.
• You  will crash at some point.
• Caffeine might get you to 6:30AM. At 6:31 you may become a zombie.
• If you need them, save the stimulants for the last minute, just before you absolutely need them.
• Bananas.
• Step out the door and breath oxygen on occasion.

Pay attention to the happiness of your team members. People will get cranky. Crankiness is infective as it is ineffective. Try to cheer each other up before the whole team’s mood goes sour.

Thus concludes the free advice from Praxis. Jason seemed pretty serious about his endorsement for bananas, and as thanks for sharing his team’s advice we’ll be sure to have plenty.

Before speed-dating began, the nonprofits also heard about free training they’ll get from mixer hosts Benchmark Learning (formerly New Horizons of Minnesota), free branding and digital communications advice they’ll get from LaBreche, and options for free web hosting they’ll get from VISI, including their ReliaCloud option.  They also heard from Brian Peterson, a nonprofit veteran from last year, who returned to tell his experience working with perennial favorites Pollywog Stew to create a new site for a nonprofit he co-founded, Students Today, Leaders Forever; check out their transformation, including before/after shots.